Israel’s government reiterated its allegations that several employees of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees, or UNRWA, have ties to Hamas despite a new U.N. investigation that said it had not provided evidence of the claims.
Former French Foreign Minister Catherine Colonna led the review, and she was specifically tasked with assessing whether UNRWA “is doing everything within its power to ensure neutrality and to respond to serious breaches when they are made,” as U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said in a statement at the time he directed the investigation.
Colonna and the investigators found “neutrality-related issues persist,” according to the report. “They include instances of staff publicly expressing political views, host-country textbooks with problematic content being used in some UNRWA schools, and politicized staff unions making threats against UNRWA management and causing operational disruptions.”
Israeli officials have said that 12 UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7 terrorist attack in Israel that resulted in the deaths of roughly 1,200 people. Israeli leaders have long accused UNRWA of employing Hamas members.
“Israel has yet to provide supporting evidence,” the investigators added. The mandate was not to investigate whether any UNRWA employees participated in the Oct. 7 attack.
Israel’s foreign ministry rebuked the report, which the department claimed “ignored the severity of the problem.”
“Hamas has infiltrated UNRWA so deeply that it is no longer possible to determine where UNRWA ends and where Hamas begins,” said Oren Marmorstein, a department spokesman. “More than 2,135 UNRWA workers are members of either Hamas or Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), while one-fifth of UNRWA school administrators are Hamas members. The problem with UNRWA-Gaza isn’t that of a few bad apples; it is a rotten and poisonous tree whose roots are Hamas.”
He did not provide evidence to support his claim that more than 2,000 UNRWA employees are members of Gaza terrorist groups.
“The Colonna report ignores the severity of the problem, and offers cosmetic solutions that do not deal with the enormous scope of Hamas’ infiltration of UNRWA,” he added. “This is not what a genuine and thorough review looks like. This is what an effort to avoid the problem and not address it head on looks like. Israel calls on the donor countries to refrain from transferring their taxpayers’ money to UNRWA-Gaza, as these funds will go to the Hamas terrorist organization, and that violates legislation in the donor countries themselves.”
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The United States was one of several countries that suspended funding for UNRWA in the wake of the allegations. Some of those countries have restarted that funding, but the U.S. has not.
Guterres agreed with the investigators’ recommendations, which fell into eight areas: engagement with donors, governance, management and internal oversight structures, the neutrality of staff and behavior, the neutrality of installations, the neutrality of education, the neutrality of staff unions, and strengthened partnership with U.N. agencies.